Local Students Set Their Sights on Space

Lenna Himmelstein | Kitsap Sun
Rebecca Campbell, a junior at Olympic High School, is one of 225 Washington students selected for the Washington Aerospace Scholar Program. Those students will compete to be one of 140 who spends the summer in an internship program at Seattle's Museum of Flight.

Drew McCullough

Lars Blazina

William Browning

When Lars Blazina, a North Kitsap High School junior, was asked for ideas on sending a manned mission to Mars, he came up with a drawing of a giant funnel designed to scoop particles of energy from space, thereby propelling a craft on its lonely journey to the Red Planet.

That's the kind of creative thinking the Washington Aerospace Scholars program is looking for among the 225 high school juniors selected this year for the chance to earn a summer internship at Seattle's Museum of Flight. There, 140 Aerospace Scholar finalists will work with experts to develop a mock mission to Mars.

Six Kitsap and North Mason County students, including Blazina, were chosen to compete for the internship. Other local Aerospace Scholars are William Browning of South Kitsap High School, Rebecca Campbell of

Olympic High School, Nate May of North Kitsap High School, Drew McCullough of King's West Academy and Maloupu Williamson of North Mason High School.

Bonnie J. Dunbar, a retired space shuttle astronaut and CEO of the Museum of Flight, was instrumental in getting Washington Aerospace Scholars launched in 2006. The program curriculum comes from NASA at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Mentors for the internship come from the University of Washington, Boeing Corp. and Hamilton Sunstrand, an aeronautics company that works with NASA. Funding for the program, covering all students' expenses, comes from Boeing and other aerospace businesses.

Gov. Chris Gregoire has endorsed Aerospace Scholars, which dovetails with her Washington Learns initiative by giving students "hands-on" experience in math and science.

Washington legislators and educators have been scrambling to address the achievement gap between American students and their foreign counterparts in math and science. The Legislature in 2007 implemented a bill to beef up public schools' math and science curricula. And organizers of the Aerospace Scholars program hope that private-public partnerships like theirs can help entice more students into math and science fields.

"For more than a decade, the declining numbers of engineers and physical scientists produced by universities in the United States has concerned many sectors of the nation," Dunbar wrote in a program overview. "The lack of qualified science, mathematics and engineering graduates has been cited by Washington State companies, such as the Boeing Company and Microsoft, as being an underlying reason for moving business activities (e.g. research and development) offshore to other countries such as India and China."

The Aerospace Scholars curriculum is demanding. To compete for a chance at the internship, Blazina and the other students must work through 10 lessons, each with background reading on science related to space exploration, questions to answer, a math problem and sometimes an extra task, such as designing a "crew exploration vehicle" that could be used for travel to Mars.

Blazina came up with the idea of the energy scooper while chatting with his buddies at lunchtime.

"It's stuff like that my friends and I talk about," Blazina said. "We're all nerds.

"When this came up, it was like a dream come true because it dealt with math and science."

The Aerospace Scholars program gives kids like Blazina a look at what they could do with their inordinate appetite for subjects many students find challenging.

"We want to open their eyes to possibilities," said Rosie Bailer, program coordinator, who added that the goal is to help students make the link between the classroom and the real world.

Browning of South Kitsap said the assignment to create a space vehicle got him thinking about the challenge of sending humans on such a long trip into space where muscles can deteriorate without gravity.

"I definitely am going to get my degree in biology," he said. "I'm not specifically sure where I want to go, but definitely something with science."

"I've always been interested in astronomy and going out into space and exploring the stars. I want to be part of the whole process," said North Mason's Williamson, who is a full-time running start student at Olympic College.

"The whole reason I got into it is because I'm interested in engineering as a career," said Olympic High's Campbell. "There aren't a many women engineers out there. I think it would be neat to pursue it."

The stereotype that boys outpace girls at math and science is crumbling away, according to Bob Barnes, principal of Olympic High.

"It's really not an issue like it used to be in the past," said Barnes, who noted that girls outnumber boys in some of his school's upper-level science classes.

Appealing to students highly motivated in math and science appears relatively easy. But what about the mainstream student population?

Statewide, students' performance on the math and science portions of the Washington Assessment of Student Learning has fallen short of the target standard. The 2007 Legislature approved a delay in making passage of the math and science WASL a graduation requirement. Math is delayed until 2013, with alternatives offered to satisfy the requirement. No target date has been set for implementing the science requirement.

Ron Ness, Browning's chemistry teacher, supports the idea of raising standards, but he says the fact that students take the WASL in their sophomore year means they have not yet had adequate exposure to other higher-level science classes.

"It's very difficult for the vast majority of students," said Ness, who supports earlier introduction of complex scientific curricula.

"The problem is as long as we continue to take the (science) WASL and it doesn't count, they're going to continue to do poorly because there's no motivation."

Last year's local Aerospace Scholars who qualified for Museum of Flight internships were Karina Hoogstede of North Kitsap High School, Sarah Thon of South Kitsap High School and Bethany Higgins of Bremerton High School.